In general, project management is understood to include planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals. In the construction industry, for example, construction management firms may be engaged in medium and large projects (e.g., sport stadiums, hospitals and healthcare facilities, office buildings, power plants, manufacturing facilities, airports, seaports and railway terminals, multi-unit residential complexes, etc.). Throughout the entire process of construction (e.g., from planning to handover), large teams of construction professionals and specialists have to be managed so as to ensure that all aspects of the construction project (e.g., partnering, estimating, purchasing, scheduling, engineering, safety, community relations, etc.) go smoothly to produce high-quality projects on time.
Conventionally, coordinating such large teams involved a lot of paperwork, including documentation related to data in the field. This is especially true in performing field management, punch list management, quality, commissioning, turn-over and safety management, and warranty- and maintenance-related functions. Such documents include, but are not limited to, field inspections, punch lists, vendor lists, resource lists, and task lists. Consequently, firms have sought processes that keep their project coordinators and subcontractors on the job site working (i.e., building and maintaining), rather than in an office shuffling papers. Furthermore, the use of documentation may slow down productivity simply due to the fact that not all of the field personnel may have access to the recorded field data, thus possibly leading to work duplication, unnecessary communications, or other cost-increasing problems.
For example, one field management process includes inspections performed in the field. Inspections are used to assure that systems and components of a building or industrial plant are installed and tested according to the operational requirements of the client or final owner. Inspections are also relied upon so as to assure that jobsite procedures and controls, such as safety requirements and government inspections, are followed in a documented manner. The inspection process may include, but is not limited to, verifying subsystems for mechanical (HVAC), plumbing, electrical, fire/life safety, building envelopes, interior systems (example laboratory units), cogeneration, utility plants, sustainable systems, lighting, wastewater, controls, and building security to achieve the owner's project requirements as intended by the building owner and as designed by the building architects and engineers. The inspection process may also include verifying the presence of safety materials and adherence to local, state, or national government regulations.
Users in the construction industry may spend a significant amount of time filling out paper-based inspection forms. For example, inspection forms may include site-specific forms, company-specific forms, city-, county-, and state-specific forms, safety forms, inspection forms, and others. The look, feel, and layout of these forms may often be dictated to the user such that the user does not have much flexibility in modifying either the content or layout of the forms. Additionally, in some cases, each inspection form must be filled out while performing the inspection at the construction site and must be completed in a specific manner, verified, distributed and stored. The field personnel must generally follow a predetermined, controlled inspection workflow to maintain an accurate audit trail related to project safety and quality. Frequently the inspection workflow requires that different personnel in the inspection process fill out different parts of the forms. For example, any single inspection form may be partitioned into separate sections (e.g., Parts A-C), such that Part A may be filled out by a subcontractor providing information on the work to be inspected, Part B may be filled out by the inspector on the construction site, and Part C may be filled out by the project supervisor verifying the results. Completed inspection forms are archived at the end of the project as an important part of the project records. The paper-nature of these forms, coupled with formatting and content restrictions, make this a labor intensive process.
Completing inspections quickly and accurately is an important part of the overall construction schedule. As an example, the drywall for a region of the building cannot be installed until all the in-wall inspections (e.g., electrical and plumbing) for that region have been successfully completed and verified. However, current inspection processes relying on the use of paper-based inspection forms can be a particularly tedious and inefficient, thereby resulting in increased costs, time delays, as well as potential risks of injury due to miscommunication and delays in reporting the status of inspection for certain systems or areas of a project. Essentially the same inspection process may be utilized in many other industries such as shipbuilding, aircraft and aerospace systems manufacturing, mining, oil and gas drilling and exploration, etc. when inspections are being performed during field operations as a part of project management process to ensure quality and compliance of work performed.